Investigation of Altitude Estimation Accuracy in Passive Radar

The paper investigates the problem of target altitude estimation in passive radar. The analysis is based on the geometry of a real passive radar system located in the city of Przasnysz, Poland. A standard approach of target localization in passive radar is assumed, where the bistatic ranges are used for position estimation. No angle measurements (neither azimuth nor elevation) are available. The procedure of accuracy estimation is introduced based on the linearization of the dependency between the Cartesian and bistatic coordinates. This leads to the conversion between the bistatic and Cartesian covariance matrices using the Jacobian matrix. Theoretical calculations are verified with the Monte Carlo simulation. The main aims of the paper are to assess the accuracy of localization estimation and investigate the achievable accuracy for different scenarios (in particular, the target altitude).